Politics & Government
Despite notable achievements, Curry says age is not on Biden’s side
Former Clinton White House aide believes primary challenge would help Democrats in 2024
By Scott Benjamin
Former WFAN radio overnight sports talk show host Tony Paige has said that when athletes are considered for a hall of fame, maybe the best system would be to just present their statistics to the voters - without their names attached, as is the case in the judging at some sports-writing contests.
If that were the case in the 2024 presidential election, Connecticut Democratic former two-time gubernatorial nominee Bill Curry indicated that he would feel more confident about Democratic President Joe Biden’s re-election prospects.
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Last December, Curry of Farmington told Patch.com that Biden’s domestic policy accomplishments represented, “The most substantial legislative package since the Great Society” – a reference to Democratic former President Lyndon Johnson’s platform of the mid-1960’s.
The 2021 infrastructure program and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act were approved with narrow Democratic majorities in Congress.
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Apparently, though, the statistics on Biden’s Strat-O-Matic card might not be enough to get him a second term.
Curry, who worked as a counselor for two years in the Bill Clinton White House, said in a more recent phone interview with Patch.com that there are other considerations – most notably that Biden is about to turn 81 years of age.
“In the polling over the last two years, Biden has done something positive and gotten no benefit from it,” said Curry. “I think age is the biggest single explanation. Biden is an old 80. If it was Nancy Pelosi [the vibrant former U.S. House speaker, who is 83 years old], age would be much less of an issue.”
“I do not think his age disqualifies him,’ he added. “But I do believe his age will be a tremendous factor in this race.”
Curry commented that age hurt Republican former Senate Leader Bob Dole in his 1996 bid for the White House when Clinton easily won a three-way race that also included independent candidate Ross Perot.
“If Bob Dole had been 10 years younger, it would have been a very different election,” he declared. “And Dole was considerably younger [then 73] than Biden is now.”
Is Biden’s candidacy viable?
“It is viable,” said Curry. “The question is if it is advisable at this point.”
“I can easily imagine scenarios in which Biden is re-elected, and I can imagine scenarios in which he is not,” he commented.
In an e-mail interview, Sacred Heart University Professor of Politics Gary Rose, stated, “Despite his age and at times disoriented statements, I do believe that President Biden continues to be a viable and formidable incumbent who stands a good chance of winning reelection. The disarray within the Republican Party coupled with the distinct possibility of former president [Donald] Trump securing the Republican nomination will work to the benefit of the President.”
“Several issues such as border security and the price of gas are on the side of the Republicans, but the turmoil within the party and the Trump indictments will have a suppressive effect on Republican chances of winning back the White House. That said, the election is still a year away and there could be big surprises that await the electorate,” added Rose.
Curry remarked, “I feel regret that there has not been a serious challenge to Biden in the primary. However, it is not because I don’t see his accomplishments, I do.”
A primary challenge? Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, recently challenged Biden, but his bid has been equated to the prospects of the Oakland Athletics winning the 2024 World Series.
Over the last 50 years there have been three incumbents who lost their bid for another term – Republican Gerald Ford in 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Republican George H.W. Bush in 1992- after facing serious challenges in the primaries. Trump lost in 2020, but only with former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld making a modest foray through the early primaries.
The late Pulitzer Prize-winner Teddy White, who lived in Bridgewater, wrote in 1982 that Ted Kennedy’s challenge to Carter was premised on turning Carter into a “limping capon” for his remaining months in office and then somehow rapidly reunifying the Democrats to win the general election after the two candidates had spent months hurling shot puts at each other.
Curry acknowledged, “Those precedents are real and relevant. These are all very risky roads. However, we’re better at assessing the risk of action than we are at assessing the risk of inaction.”
Democratic State Central Committee Secretary Audrey Blondin of Goshen disagreed in an e-mail interview with Patch.com.
"[Biden] is exactly the type of person we want and need as our leader in these difficult and perilous times and having a serious primary challenger would only serve to enhance the divisiveness of today's political world and quite possibly be the factor that throws next year's November election to Donald Trump,” she stated.
Last December, Curry named U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna of California and U.S. Sen. Angus King of Maine as worthy potential competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination.
He predicted in the more recent interview that there easily could be a primary challenge without rancor.
Curry said that Trump, who is again running for the Republican nomination, faces 91 felony counts, yet his primary opponents “can’t say a bad word about him.”
“It doesn’t have to be a bitter contest,” he remarked. “There is no ideological divide in the Democratic Party.”
Curry said if Biden emerged as the nominee he would ambitiously support the president's re-election bid.
As for the Republican race, Curry said that for four years he has been signing e-mail messages that Trump will go to jail, and he thinks that is about to happen.
“He is charged with felonies that with the maximum penalty would put him in jail for many lifetimes,” he commented. “I believe he will lose almost all the cases. He will likely lose two of them before the primaries are over. The cases against him are overwhelming.”
“The very idea of his being nominated for the office of the presidency [again] by a major party, I still find preposterous. I don’t think it will happen,” Curry exclaimed. “He has never been in the courts the way he is now.”
However, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump is a prohibitive favorite to win the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses in January.
Sources ranging from former Republican presidential candidate Will Hurd to Pulitzer Prize-winner George Will have recently taken a seat on the Nikki Haley bandwagon. Is the former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador the best candidate the Republicans could put on the ballot?
Curry remarked, “I have thought so for a long time.”
However, he drew an analogy: Connecticut Republicans have declined to nominate such “good candidates” as former state House GOP Leader Themis Klarides of Madison, former state Sen. John McKinney of Fairfield and former Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton for statewide office over the last decade.
“Are they [the national Republicans] more capable of nominating Nikki Haley? I just don’t know” Curry said.
Regardless of who the eventual nominees are, Curry said he expects a competitive race.
“We no longer live in a democracy that has landslides,” he commented, making note of the Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan lopsided victories from decades ago. “We live in a constant cycle of photo finishes.”
On another topic, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt contends in his recent book, “Ours Was The Shining Future,” that “the Democratic Party [has] turned toward liberal social issues that appealed to college-educated professionals and away from blue-collar economic issues.”
Curry stated, “What cost Democrats support among working class voters was our failure to deliver on bread and butter issues like a living wage, a public option, high costs of food, energy and education and our abject failure to fight public corruption. To be sure, ‘woke’ issues discomfit many voters. Republicans use transgender rights the way they once used gay marriage. Now that they won't even talk about gay marriage, abortion or gun safety in public, fanning fear of the transgendered may be the last culture card they have left to play.”
His former boss, Bill Clinton, was rated fifth in Economic Management out of the 45 former presidents in the 2021 C-SPAN poll of dozens of journalists and presidential scholars.
In 1998 under Clinton there was a federal budget surplus for the first time in 29 years. Now it has been 22 years since the last federal budget surplus.
The Congressional Budget Office has reported that the federal budget deficit for the last fiscal year was $1.7 trillion. The interest on the federal debt is approaching $1 trillion per year.
Will wrote recently in the Washington Post that, “The debt tsunami is the nation’s most important domestic problem, and it threatens national security via pressure to curtail defense spending. . . The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards calculates that if average annual spending growth in this century had merely equaled average nominal GDP growth of 4.2 percent, today’s budget would be balanced. Spending actually grew at an average annual rate of 5.7 percent.”
Wall Street Journal chief economics commentator Greg Ip recently stated, “In the early 1990s, Congress was less polarized and presidents were more willing to make hard choices on debt. Today, the parties are so polarized that they only listen to views they already agree with. Both oppose cutting Social Security or Medicare, the two biggest spending programs, or raising taxes on most Americans.”
H.W. Bush increased taxes in 1990 on the condition that Congress enact the Pay As You Go budget controls. Clinton increases taxes in 1993 and then after the 1994 Republican midterm election victories worked with the GOP congressional majority on deficit reduction.
Why aren’t those steps being taken now?
Curry stated, “I agree with [New York Times economic columnist and Nobel Prize-winner] Paul Krugman that deficit hawks have long exaggerated the magnitude of the threat, but I don't think their fears were wholly unfounded. Many progressives act as if there were no limit to the amount of debt an economy as big as ours can sustain.”
“I believe there are fiscal and economic limits and also political limits to how much the public is willing to raise taxes or incur debt,” he added. “There is great public support for restoring Clinton-era tax rates on the very rich, and for other progressive tax measures but all of these won't be enough to meet all our needs.”
Resources:
Phone interview with Bill Curry, Patch.com, on Sunday, October 29, 2023.
E-mail interview with Bill Curry, Patch.com, on Monday, October 30, 2023.
E-mail interview with Gary Rose, Patch.com, on Monday, October 30, 2023.
E-mail interview with Audrey Blondin, Patch.com, on Wednesday, November 1, 2023.
“America In Search of Itself, Theodore White, HarperCollins Publishers, 1982.
"Ours Was the Shining Future," David Leonhardt, Random House, 2023.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/what-can-the-fed-do-about-the-deficit-nothing-12b471e
https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?category=3
https://www.wsj.com/politics/e...
WFAN Radio, September, 2017.
Wikipedia: H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton.
